Research On The Inheritance Disputes In Villages Of Chongqing (1937 To 1945)

After twists and turns, modern civil inheritance system was eventually established in the period of the Nanjing National Government. The thesis, by sorting and analyzing the files of Jiangbei County Court in the Republic of China, has explored the truth of the rural inheritance dispute in Chongqing under the background of the Anti-Japanese War. With a comprehensive study of social change’s influence on the order of succession in rural areas, the thesis has revealed the adjustments made by rural people in the face of legal transformation and social change.The thesis consists of four parts.The first part is the introduction, which described the origin of the subject, summarized relevant research results at home and abroad, pointed out the innovation and significance of research and illustrated the purpose and methods of research.The second part discussed the evolution of the inheritance system in theories. In the traditional society, the property inheritance relied on the family property division; in the modern times, the division gradually disappeared from the national law and the Nanjing National Government issued the Civil Code of Republic of China- the Inheritance Section in 1930, which abolished ancestral inheriting system and established modern inheritance system including gender equality, legal inheritance and liberal testament. It provided the legal basis for the judgment of the rural inheritance dispute in Chongqing.The third part made an empirical analysis of the rural inheritance dispute in Chongqing. Based on the files of Jiangbei County Court in the Republic of China, with the use of statistical methods, two groups were divided by the subject of the dispute: male relatives and female relatives. Furthermore, combined with the background of the war, this part analyzed the causes of the inheritance dispute, analyzed the behaviors, strategies and underlying logics of major parties in the litigation including the father and son, brothers, uncle and nephew, daughters, wife and concubines, analyzed the judicial temperament of the judge and explored the impact of traditional family property division on judicial proceedings in order to comprehensively reflect the impact of the new inheritance system on rural life and rural people’s response under the context of legal transformation.The fourth part gave a comprehensive evaluation on the practice of rural inheritance in Chongqing. Through empirical analysis of the case, the rural inheritance dispute in Chongqing and its settlement demonstrated three characteristics: there was a combination between mediation and judgment, of which litigation became an important way of dispute settlement, but mediation played a limited role in inheritance even though the national government vigorously pursued it during the war; there showed a strategy combining emotion and law and as the traditional moral expression of injustice could not meet the needs of litigation, it became a major strategy for both parties to seek a combination between emotion and law in the proceedings; there was significantly stronger concern of interest and rural people were more concerned about material interests due to special wartime economy, provoking malicious prosecutions and thereby affecting the behavior of the parties in the proceedings and the final settlement of the dispute.